Reading and Teleprompter

Best Practice :: Advanced

As you prepare, take time to identify the aspects of each story that will have the most impact on your viewers.

In conversation, we create and vary pace and rhythm by the way we build our arguments to make a point.

When you know exactly what you're going for, your pace will tend to:

• accelerate as you build toward it,
• slow as you drive the point home, and
• reaccelerate as you begin to work toward the next important point.

This is much more effective than simply going faster or slower, because speeding up or slowing down has nothing to do with the story you are telling. And for the best and most committed communicators, everything about delivery must be calibrated based on the story.

This is why, even as you gain experience, preparation becomes more important ... not less. No matter how well you read, your choices on the fly will not be as effective as those you make when you take time before a newscast to study what you want to say (especially when you are reading copy originally created by someone else).

Until you take the time to make these critical choices for yourself, the story represents the writer's thought process and not your own. So, you must make it your to read and communicate it powerfully.

Reading and Teleprompter: